Knowledge via Study Only - Experience NOT Necessary?

Great Debates
21

Well, how can one black person’s experience of racism help them understand a different black person’s experience of racism? They have had different experiences, so how can they understand what it’s like to be the other person?

At some point, we have to recognize the existance of a quality called “empathy”. Sure, I don’t know what it’s like to go through life as a black guy, or a guy in a wheelchair, or a woman, or a left-hander. But I’ve experienced pain, I’ve experienced mean behavior, I’ve experienced life as a human being, and since we’re all human beings here (with the occasional sentient dolphin thrown in), I can empathize with the life experiences of other human beings.

Sure, I might not have a very good appreciation for exactly how much of a pain in the ass it is to experience day to day racism. I might not have a good appreciation for how much of a drag it is to not be able to walk, and so on. But to declare that such experiences are beyond my understanding, that I’m incapable of understanding, is merely to declare that no human being can ever truly understand any other human being. In one sense this is true, in the end everybody dies alone. In another sense it is false, I can read stories written thousands of years ago and recognize and empathize with the human attributes and emotions of those people.

22

I dunno…perhaps the critic just knows better ways to express the meaning in analytical terms than the artist. Almost any creative endeavor involves an ability to “do” something without necessarily “thinking” about it; does that constitute knowledge?

23

I’d still like to hear whether the OP truly believes that “emotional knowledge” is a valid form of evidence (or substitute for “factual evidence”) when it comes to medicine.

24

Lemur866, I see what you’re saying. Did you ever read “Black Like Me”? He started out as an empathetic person (or else he wouldn’t have tried the experiment), but was still shocked at how little he “knew”. Isn’t empathy somewhat limited by our own experience of pain?

CJJ* I was told that the learning process for art is roughly:

Unconscious Incompetence
Conscious Incompetence
Conscious Competence
Unconscious Competence
I do agree Thudlow Boinkthat what viewers (critics and whoever else) glean from art has its own value, sometimes perhaps a better understanding of meaning than the artist. “Meaning” is so personal, how can it even be judged? Critics can know a lot more about context, or be better at putting it into words; a viewer’s interpretation can be really fresh and interesting. But I don’t think that a critic who’s never painted can know painting.

25

I’m sorry, I thought you were being rhetorical. Isn’t it kind of hard to tease out strictly emotional knowledge vis-a-vis medicine because of the placebo effect? Isn’t it true that a patient’s belief in the efficacy of their treatment plan (or lack thereof) greatly affects outcome?

Or is that just something I learned from watching ER?

26

It would be scary because your stated personal bias is against the utility of facts, an opinion that seems to place truthiness over truth. Your clarification of your meaning seems to indicate that you feel facts are not useful by themselves rather than not useful at all, which the statement I replied to implies.

As far as facts being sufficient for the understanding of something significant, I think I can say that the operation of the sun is rather significant, what with it being responsible for all or almost all life on Earth. It is also quite independent of the need for personal experience.

From your later posts you seem to be saying that experience is necessary to convey emotion, that it cannot be understood by the facts of the matter. That is debatable, but is miles away from the OP.

27

Why?

28

Because there’s so much to be experienced about painting that cannot be put into words.

Maybe that’s all I’m trying to say, that words are insufficient.

29

My example would be:
If I had to start a fire while rubbing two twigs, I’d ask a Boy Scout what the best way is.
If I wanted to know what happens a the molecular level in a fire, I would ask a physicist to explain it to me.

30

The existence of psychological factors that may influence (to a limited extent) how a patient responds to a particular therapy does not create a valid database of “emotional knowledge”.

Anyway, the placebo effect has not been the basis of what you’ve suggested here or in other medically-related threads. You evidently have the idea that feelings or intuition (such as the conviction of some mothers that vaccines caused their children’s autism) allow us to disregard solid evidence to the contrary.

This mindset isn’t as objectionable when it comes to relationships or even politics, but it’s wildly out of place in the world of science.

31

The Gynecologist would know more about delivering babies assuming he has had a lot of experience, but the teenage parents would know more about how it feels to have a baby than the doctor.

32

I agree with you entirely, I can’t think of a single instance that real experience isn’t better than just reading about something. After all we go to school to study for the professions, and vocations we want to experience. When you go to apply for a job, the first thing they ask, is what kind of experience have you had. The more you have the more likely it is you will be hired.

33

Absolutely. Holding a bunch of facts doesn’t mean you can do anything helpful with them. In one of my college classes was a young man only 17 years old. I learned he was a junior in college. He had the ability to read and remember whole books, so he could easily pass tests. That’s why he was considered a “gifted” child, but he had no common sense at all. He had someone with him all the time, because he couldn’t do even simple tasks like tying his own shoe laces. He couldn’t drive, no sense of direction, he couldn’t find he next class, etc. So, even if he could recite the entire medical library, I sure wouldn’t want him treating me for some illness.

34

I’m sorry, jack, I was terribly vague when posting yesterday. That’s not at all the dichotomy I was trying to draw, emotions v. logic.

No, actually, concerning science, the objection raised in jsgoddess’s original thread is that science isn’t learned effectively via a memorization of facts. It’s a hands-on topic. It’s an observational topic - when teaching children about science, the world is the laboratory. You go out and see things and do things, you don’t just talk about them. It’s first-hand, experiential knowledge. There’s a lot of concern that children don’t spend enough time playing with real materials, in the real world, experiencing physics and chemistry and biology with their own eyes and hands.

Sensory, experiential knowledge is more the point I’ve been trying to make, not “emotions”, or “intuition”.

Such as, with 9/11 – “2 planes hit buildings, 3,000 people died” does NOT describe what happened. We all went through a million tiny changes from that event. I think a person really had to live through it to understand – although, now that I have lived through a Day When the World Changed, I have a better appreciation for what it was like when JFK was assassinated.

Jackmanii, I know you have me pegged as some kind of “mystic” over here, because of some ignorant remarks I made in your homeopathy thread. But that’s actually not at all the case. I thought I’d made it clear to you that your posts caused me to revise my opinion on homeopathic medicine. I was wrong, I didn’t know enough before I started posting.

Re: vaccinations and autism, I was arguing WITH you, posing questions so that I could try to discuss the topic with my anti-vaccine friends. I hope that the lawsuit working its way through the courts reveals some strong answers on that subject, in meaningful language. I’m sure my conversations with them accomplished precisely nothing - mothers are a risk-averse group, and right now the risk from the vaccine is perceived (by some) as greater than the risk of the disease. They’re going to have to live through something different before they change their minds. Information on paper, on the computer, simply can’t trump experiential beliefs.

Risk-aversion by moms is a powerful instinct; the medical community needs to work with it, not fight it.

It’s really troubling in some instances - those Amber Alerts scare the crap out of us moms. The way the media covers crimes against children has created an environment of enormous fear. Since we can watch those kids on television and hear the parents’ anguish, it’s as though they lived next door to each of us. We are experiencing their fear and loss - we see them, we hear them.

Yet, statistically, the greatest threat to our own children isn’t from some random stranger - it’s from people that we know, it’s from our cars, it’s from our backyard swimming pools. Show them statistics on child injuries and deaths, though, and they still won’t let their preschoolers play outside.

Sorry this has been, like, the worst GD ever.
I should just stick to lurking.

35

fessie. You have expressed yourself and your concerns very well in this thread and I think you are right. It is a great thread with some good points.

36

I would believe what the mothers are saying. Far too many times pills, shots, treatments have been recalled because they harm or even kill the patients statistics say they should have helped. How many pills were recalled just this year? Science statistics are not perfect, we have the recall evidence to prove that.

On the first day of my statistics class the professor said: “all statistics lie, and I will prove it to you.” Which he did. Statistics are not reality, only averages, or coefficents of reality. The professor brought out a bowl of marbles, “the marbles in this bowl average one-half inch in diameter, but there is not a single marble one-half inch in diameter in this bowl.” He had many more examples, don’t get hung up on statistics. Find out the reality of the event.

37

lekatt, thank you. I think you are a very kind person.

38

lekatt, the exact examples you cite are *perfect * examples of the power and importance of statistics and science to our modern life.

Let’s take Vioxx as an example of a high profile and perhaps the single most important drug recall in recent history. Vioxx worked fairly well as a pain killer and patients were generally content with it. The only reason that it was pulled from the market was because a very large and very long study about its safety and effectiveness discovered that it raised the risk of cardiac events, which are themselves very common among the people most likely to be taking the drug.

There wasn’t a single clinician (or herbalist, accupunturist, or naturopath) in the nation that said to themselves, “holy-crap, I gave the 64 year old obese smoker Mr. Smith a prescription for Vioxx three years ago and yesterday he suffered a major heart attack, someone call the FDA!” There was not a single persons whose experience, clinical judgement, or otherwise gave any hint of danger. In fact the “experience” that people had with Vioxx was overwhelmingly positive. Yesterday I was in pain, now I’m not. A great many posters on this board responded with dismay and frustration to hear that Vioxx had been pulled from the market, and many felt that it should still be available in certain circumstances because they felt the drug had worked very well for them or someone they knew. Similarly, doctors felt they were “good” drugs because they likely had nothing but positive experiences.

Instead, the careful compilation of data from an enormous number of people over a long period of time provided incontrovertiable evidence that this “good” drug that everyone (doctors/patients/drug companies) liked was in fact killing people.

You can thank statistics and science for that one.

39

Most people don’t have any perspective. They overvalue their own experiences and ignore facts that don’t support their preconceived notions. They jump from specific examples to generalizations and then argue from those generalizations.

The story of the blind men and the elephant is a good illustration.

There are times when experience is necessary as a basis for any useful discussion. There are other times when experience is immaterial or impossible.

40

Let’s try and approach the original question in a different way. Is it “sometimes true that first-hand knowledge is more authentic and informed than a scholarly view”?

Knowledge–borrowing from Plato–is justified true belief. Leaving aside the question of “truth” for the moment, the key point here is that a justification for a belief is essential to turn it into knowledge. I think when we say “first-hand knowledge”, we mean a knowledge that is justified by personal experience, whereas “scholarly view” means knowledge justified by reading, analysis–just about anything other than first-hand experience.

Evaluating any one belief, I think, involves using some method to see if it corresponds to reality–this is the “truth” portion of the definition. I think determining the value of particular knowledge then relies solely on the data contained in the belief, not the justification used to hold that belief. If, for example, two people correctly solve a math problem using two different methods, no one is going to argue one solution is better than the other for that particular problem based on the method chosen. Particular beliefs, then, are neither better or worse based on the method used to justify them.

But if the core belief obtained through experience is different than the core belief obtained thru study–and they both purport to be describing the same truth–the quality of the knowledge–the way we choose which is “better”–is directly related to the evaluation of that knowledge’s validity. This evaluation changes radically based on the nature of the knowledge itself. If I say “I know how to drive a car”, you’d likely evaluate my knowledge by actually having me drive a car, an evaluation that gives the edge, I think, to experience-learning. If I say “I know how a car works”, that knowledge is more likely to be evaluated verbally, and here knowledge acquired via scholarship will have the edge. In short, I submit knowledge is “better” if the method used to acquire it is closer to the form used to evaluate it.

The in-between case “I know how to fix a car” is more interesting, as the knoweldge would most likely be evaluated using both methods; I certainly wouldn’t want a mechanic who has never read a book about automobile engines, but I also wouldn’t want one who’s never personally popped a hood. This is because the way I tell the mechanic knows how to fix a car is if my car is running well after he works on it, and I’m smart enough to know in advance the problem could be something he’s seen before (giving the edge to experience) or it could involve something he’s never seen before (edge to study). Since I don’t know that in advance, I want a mechanic with both kinds of knowledge, and wouldn’t feel comfortable parsing down which is “better”.